Sound — 10
I Have a Custom guitar with P-90's and a Washburn Idol with EMG's and I play though a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. This pedal has amazing amounts of gain available to it so with the higher gain and louder amp volume there is the expected noise, but nothing over the top. I love a thick distortion but I need clarity too, so I have the gain at about 12 o'clock and the filter ant about 1 o'clock. This gives me a nice fat blues distortion on the bridge pickup and a fuzz esque tone on the neck for fat sustained solos, boy can this thing sustain, it cleans up with your picking attack so very well I dumped my pants the first time I used it. If you wanted a phat metal distortion crack it all the way up and add some bass. it's way nicer then that buzz saw sound from the Boss Metal Zone, which is the fat whore sister of all pedals.

Overall Impression — 9
I play blues, rock, blues rock, reggae. It's great for Hendrix, old Clapton, it's just amazing for my style, I never used to like distortions but this thing totally converted me to the dark side. I've been playing for about 5 years now and own a crap load other pedals, I have it and a Boss SD-1 for the lighter stuff on my board and it's perfect. I love the versatility of this pedal, I can do calm Overdrive or over the top fuzz. It also responds very well to picking, better then any other pedal I've tried. If it where stolen, I would find the thief and make sure he was using it well, then I'd beat the hell out of him for the mere principal of the matter, and buy a new one.

Reliability & Durability — 10
I would defiantly depend on this without backup, and have quite frequently for about a year now. It's built like a sh*t brick house. I've thrown, stomped, hit with a hammer. it's still perfect.

Ease of Use — 7
The Rat is freakin' amazing, you can get anywhere from a cool sparkle to almost a fuzz. But to do this you need to do some tweaking, to your amp and to the pedal itself, but you'll love it once you get the hang of it. The Filter Knob, wich is the tone knob works the opposite way from most Tone knobs, left is more treble, right is more Bass. The Distortion knob increases the gain very dramatically from 2 to 4, at 2 and below you get some cleaner, but after that it's gets gainier so much quicker.